Customer Success Manager, Higher Education

At Blackbaud, our vision is to power an Ecosystem of Good® that builds a better world, and our global Customer Success center of excellence exists to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes and have a strong experience using Blackbaud solutions and services. At its center, the Customer Success Manager (CSM) is responsible for the proactive partnership with each customer, leveraging expertise of the social good sector and the pivotal role of cloud technology and data to help customers maximize value from their existing solutions towards defined, measurable, and verifiable outcomes.

As transformational agents who proactively conduct the customer experience, each CSM’s primary focus is to deliver, in a measurable way, 1:1 and 1:many success planning and related onboarding, adoption and health programming with customers (on a tiered basis according to their investment) throughout the customer journey. This includes onboarding assistance and thereafter regular executive business reviews backed by joint success plans and sentiment tracking. Every CSM should leverage data and insight to proactively manage risks to customers’ success, demonstrate value to customers, and help accelerate their progress. The role is relationship-focused and aligns our users and Blackbaud to shared goals, resulting in lower customer churn, more referrals, and increased investments in our solutions over time.

CSMs are responsible for retention of our customers, and organized for the most part by region, vertical, size, and/or product, with robust use of customer success tools to effectively execute responsibilities. They are also customer advocates, serving as voice of the customer within Blackbaud, internally guiding customer strategy; product, service and support requirements; experience across Market Groups and Verticals; product and relationship marketing and other communications; and other functional areas.

This position will be based remotely in the United States working with customers in the Higher Education vertical.

Responsibilities As a CSM

• Understand the needs and priorities of customers across the social good ecosystem, industry best practices, and how our specific solution capabilities drive value.
• Build and maintain strong strategic relationships with c-suite executives, senior directors and managers, and other key stakeholders across our customers, gaining trust and respect.
• Develop and execute jointly agreed success plans with each customer, underpinned by regular executive business review meetings, to ensure speed to results against their desired outcomes.
• Onboard new customers, ensuring that they understand how best to leverage the support, services, training, community, and other resources available.
• Analyze and share customer product usage data and rapidly identify opportunities for strategic action to reduce retention risk and drive progress towards outcomes.
• Understand and track customer sentiment data, respond promptly to user survey responses, and proactively action wellness plans for at-risk customers.
• Support the wider customer success and marketing teams to identify, develop, and deliver adoption webinars, user groups, events, blogs, customer stories, and other thought leadership for customers.
• Handle professionally even the most difficult or sensitive situations with external parties, turning negative or adversarial situations into positive results for both Blackbaud and the customer.
• Assist the renewals team when needed, such as when a renewal is identified as being at high risk or currently interrupted for any reason.
• Perform robust data management activities in Gainsight to underpin all the above responsibilities, which benefits customer-facing staff across Blackbaud and management metrics and reporting.
• Assist other CSMs and teams as needed, providing expertise, mentoring and guidance – embracing our single team approach to customer success globally.
  
  

In support of these responsibilities, all CSMs should proactively seek to:

• Help customers drive increased usage of and value from Blackbaud solutions towards their outcomes.
• Help protect and grow recurring revenue (software, premium services, and transactional processing).
• Share with customers best practice usage and use cases from other customers.
• Help understand, track and improve the health, needs and satisfaction of our customers.
• Be responsive to customer requests and concerns.
  
  

Cohesive relationships with other teams is critical – working together to maximize the value Blackbaud brings each customer, in alignment with their organizational outcomes and a clear understanding of roles and responsibilities. This includes close partnership across our customer success center of excellence, with products and marketing, and between CSMs and customer account executives (sales) as the core customer account team.

Required Qualifications

• 1 - 3 years of experience working in or with Higher Education.
• Experience working with Blackbaud software and solutions.
• Strong understanding of the enabling role of cloud software, services, expertise, and data intelligence to connect people to drive impact.
• Demonstrable experience with relationship-building, account management, and/or delivering outstanding customer service.
• Experience and success in fostering open communication and candid discussions at all levels of the organization, even on highly sensitive topics or escalations.
• Experience working independently to targets while also being a highly committed team-player, including both receiving and providing guidance and mentoring.
• Excellent written, oral communication, and presentation skills, including exuding confidence and instilling confidence in others, and deep comfort operating with c-suite executives.
• Competence and comfort in drawing meaningful insight from data, and of both utilizing and demonstrating cloud technology.
• Ability and willingness to learn rapidly, to think globally and incisively, to trouble-shoot and find solutions through internal cross-team collaboration, and to take a broad view of all variables that could impact future success.
  
  

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Blackbaud is a remote-first company which embraces a flexible remote work culture. Blackbaud supports hiring and career development for all roles from the location you are in today!

Blackbaud is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to maintaining a diverse and inclusive work environment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, physical or mental disability, age, or veteran status or any other basis protected by federal, state, or local law.

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The starting base pay is $53,400.00 to $70,300.00. Blackbaud may pay more or less based on employee qualifications, market value, Company finances, and other operational considerations.

Benefits Include

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Remote-first workforce
• 401(k) program with employer match
• Flexible paid time off
• Generous Parental Leave
• Volunteer for vacation
• Opportunities to connect to build community and belonging
• Pet insurance, legal and identity protection
• Tuition reimbursement program
  
  

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